NON-FICTION
The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart
By Bill Bishop
Commentators have been sharing their worries over the state of the community in American society for at least 150 years.
In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America predicted that Americans would struggle to balance the needs of the community with the individualistic American character.
In the 1950s, David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd traced the evolution of dominant American personality types from tradition-directeds to modern-day outer-directeds who define themselves as a function of the way others live, work, think about politics and play.
In the 1980s Robert Bellah wrote Habits of the Heart, contending that our preoccupation with our own pursuits was often detrimental to our common interest. And in 2000, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone used a raft of data on American life to postulate the collapse and potential revival of the American community.
Now Bill Bishop, a former newspaper reporter living in Austin, Texas, offers a new analysis of the American community in his book The Big Sort, published in May 2008. He has scoured many sources of data-voting records, IRS income patterns, patent filings, and poll numbers from advertising firms to craft a picture of Americans sorting themselves in the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities—not at the regional level, or the red state/blue state level but at the micro level of the city and neighborhood.
He begins by quoting the late playwright Arthur Miller on the 2004 election: "How can the polls be neck and neck and I don't know one Bush supporter?" He then visits tiny Wauconda, Washington, outside Spokane, and describes political segregation, the politics of migration and the psychology of the tribe.
Bishop relies heavily on election data. Even though (until the last general election) most recent presidential elections have been exceedingly close, much of the country has actually been polarized into blocks with landslides for one or the other candidate. As a result, national and state governments increasingly have had to reconcile the demands of communities that have less and less in common with each other. In this setting of political segregation, the "us" versus "the fringe" is often based on geography. All the Nebraskans agree, "Those people in California are really weird."
In this consistently readable text, Bishop offers an intriguing discussion of the politics of "people like us."
We have built a country, Bishop writes, where everyone can choose their neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with their lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation: pockets of like-minded citizens have become so ideologically inbred that they don't know and can't understand "those people" who live just a few miles away.
Here's how he describes Democrats: "[They] want to live by their own rules. They hang out with friends at parks and think that politics and religion should not mix. They watch Sunday morning talking heads and late-night television. They listen to NPR, read music and lifestyle publications and watch network television. They are more likely to own cats."
In contrast, "Republicans go to church, spend more time with family and get their news from Fox News or the radio. They own guns, read sports and home magazines and talk politics at church. They believe that people should take more personal responsibility for their lives, and that overwhelming force is the way to deal with terrorists. They are more likely than Democrats to own dogs."
Does this balkanization matter? Bishop contends that it does. Mixed company moderates, like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.
We have cleansed our personal spaces of any messy diversity, and removed all the give and take that fosters democracy. This division might not be so complete if people of differing views at least lived within shouting distance, or encountered one another on the street or in the store from time to time. But many of us have chosen our neighborhoods because the people are just like us and hence comfortable.
Bishop draws on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create a compelling account of the way we live now. I am sure there will be some follow-up since our recent election. It will be interesting to see whether new data and analysis reflect simply overwhelming frustration with our current state of affairs or some revival of more widespread appreciation for common values and purpose.
Descartes' Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason
By Russell Shorto
If you are like me, the most you can remember about Descartes is the phrase, "cogito ergo sum," or "I think, therefore I am." That's from the "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences" published in 1637, in case you've forgotten.
Descartes was born in France, but spent most of his adult life in the Dutch republic. One of the most influential and controversial thinkers of his time, he died of pneumonia in Stockholm in 1650. He was buried there, until his remains were unearthed some 16 years later by the French Ambassador Hugues De Terlon. Or were they???
De Terlon, who believed that Descartes had penetrated to the mystical heart of nature, took a finger bone as a religious relic, a holy object meant to bridge the gap between the material and the eternal.
It turns out that Descartes' body was buried and reburied at least twice and at some point, his head (skull) was separated from the rest of his body. Surely, this is irony you could not make up. De Terlon had the bones interred with honor at the Church of St. Genevieve in Paris and then, more than a century later, they were rescued from mindless mobs during the French Revolution and unearthed again. They ultimately landed at the Museum of Man in Paris.
Russell Short takes the reader on a compelling journey through 350 years of history in search of the true final resting place of the physical remains of the man ostensibly responsible for the advent of rational thought and modern scientific inquiry.
In an age of faith, what Descartes proposed—that one could find truth in facts that could be proved, and not in reliance on tradition and the teaching of the Church—seemed like heresy.
After his death Descartes' physical remains decomposed, but his philosophical outlook grew and spread. Like-minded thinkers around Europe passionately embraced his book, and "the method" was applied to medicine, nature, politics and society.
But this is more than a historical travelogue. Shorto recounts how the life and work of Descartes have been interpreted through the centuries, how his ideas not only directed the journey of his physical remains but shaped the fabric of Western civilization.
Shorto writes, "But my point in pursuing the trail of Descartes bones has been metaphorical: uncannily, they seem to form a spine, if you will pardon the expression, of modernity itself.
"By the time of the French Revolution, the [mathematician] Condorcet and his compatriots looked on the bones in the mirror opposite way: as relics of secularism, symbols of the force that reoriented people and society toward the here and now and gave rise to the principles of individual liberty, equality, and democracy.
"For Berzelius, Cuvier, and other nineteenth century scientists, the skull was a talisman of science. Descartes' bones-or rather, the meanings people have attached to them—are really about who we were and are, including the convictions and confusions and confrontations that divide us."
The controversy Descartes ignited continues to our day. The parallel to religious fundamentalism here and abroad is obvious. Scientists write best sellers about atheism, and in medicine, we struggle to define best practice based on evidence, not tradition. Shorto is spot-on with regard to the enduring aspects of Descartes thought. In the epilogue, he notes:
"We are all philosophers because our condition demands it. We live every moment in a universe of seemingly eternal thoughts and ideas, yet simultaneously in the constantly churning and decaying world of our bodies and their humble situations.... The result is a nagging need to find meaning."
This is a smart and entertaining look that presents a series of real events as a detective story to structure a review of history and the evolution of rational thought.
Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era
By Nell Irvin Painter
Between 1877 and 1919, the 42-year period between the end of Reconstruction and the end of World War I, the United States made the substantial transition from a rural, agriculturally based country to an industrial nation.
The focus of Nell Irvin Painter's book, originally published in 1987, is the struggle between "partisans of democracy" and "protectors of hierarchy" during that evolution. As I have written before, that time in our nation's history reminds me of the present in multiple ways—a struggle between the haves and the have-nots, between the supply-siders and the rest of us.
A depression in the 1890s was the worst the U.S. had ever experienced up to that time. Recovery from that depression was tied to the growth of industry and increasing dominance by the upper class elites over the lower class working population. In chapters on race and women in the workforce, the author looks at how the captains of industry used race, gender and ethnicity to keep labor in its place. Their policies and practices led to growing inequities of all kinds. Industrial laborers and agricultural workers pushed back strongly, giving rise to labor unions and civil disobedience. Painter, a professor of history emeritus at Princeton, writes at length of the public's identification of organized labor with fearful incendiary radicalism. But, that characterization of the labor movement as excessively violent was too narrowly focused and missed the point that was surely transformational. Labor was part of a larger progressive movement that advocated wider participation of all workers in the economy of the nation.
The progressives were certainly not saints. Their glory years coincided with the heyday of lynching and segregation, the bold theft of the Panama Canal, of immigration restriction and ethnic stereotypes.
But, by and large, the progressives were conservative reformers who aimed to balance wealth and commonwealth. They forced many of the progressive reforms of the early 20th century—publicly regulated or owned transportation, sanitation and utility systems, improved antitrust laws that helped restore competition in the marketplace, increased fairness in taxation, expansion of public education and juvenile justice systems, safer workplaces and guarantees of compensation to workers injured on the job, oversight of purity of water, medication and food, conservation of public wilderness and public bidding on public mining, lumber harvest and ranching.
These reforms took place, in large part, because citizens organized behind the principle that people have a right to government that promotes their safety and happiness.
The progressives' common enemy was unchecked privilege; their common hope was a better democracy. In a few short years, the progressive movement made possible the election of reform mayors and governors and national figures like Bob Lafollette of Wisconsin and Theodore Roosevelt, both Republicans.
In this "degenerate and unlovely age," as someone called it, what bothered the progressives was not just the poverty and inequity, but a political system for sale.
The U.S. Senate was a millionaire's club. Money given to political machines controlled nominations, city halls, state houses and court rooms. With enough money, you could even stack the Supreme Court.
This book is not just about political agendas of the time. Painter discusses, perhaps most importantly, the part ordinary people have played in America's history, and she delves into how international issues became intertwined with domestic policy. The collapse of the European economy led to increased immigration to America. The dynamics of incorporating those immigrants into the American economy—generally from the bottom up—created pressures that led up to World War I and ultimately forced the isolationist U.S., focused on its own expansion, to participate.
Woven into this complex fabric is Painter's definition of what it means to be an American citizen—to be included, not excluded—without regard to gender or color.
Fast forward to our most recent 20 years. Our leaders failed to respond to public discontents, to the daily lives of workers, consumers, parents and ordinary taxpayers. They allowed conservatives to convert public concern over a decline in the U.S. economy into hostility toward the government and an embrace of the notion of social Darwinism as moral philosophy, with multinational corporations as a governing class, the markets as a transcendental belief system and with scant regulation or other adult supervision. Finally, this house of cards collapsed, and we are now in the position of creating a new American dream.
Imagine an economy that puts people first.
Imagine the widespread right of all citizens to pursue genuinely larger lives.
As Franklin Roosevelt understood, Americans will postpone immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices—if they must—so long as they are convinced the future will be better than the past.
THIS BOOK DEMONSTRATES that government can do many things, but it cannot by itself transform society. Then, as now, only the people can do that.
Breaking free of our rigid top-down system and liberating workers, consumers, parents and regular people to enjoy the rights of participation in our bounty would represent a profound change. I think that now, as then, we are witness to some crumbling of the old order that, even without the incendiary radicalism, will clear the way for dramatic progress.
Armageddon comes from the Book of Revelations, 16:16 (Har-Magedon) and symbolizes the place where the "Battle of the Great Day of God Almighty" shall be fought. It has come to mean that the final battle, the last and completely destructive battle, will be fought between good and evil.
One hundred years ago, the battles attendant to the birth of organized labor might have seemed like the final conflict. Instead, they led to a more evolutionary development of a new social order. In this provocative book, we see the potential of an energized public, then as now, that senses profound inequity in our country and seeks an engaged and responsive government to change direction.
Shadow Country: A New Rendering of the Watson Legend
By Peter Matthiessen
“A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see [its] mystery.” – John Keats
Winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 2008, Shadow Country is a great and big book. The book has an interesting provenance. Matthiessen’s manuscript originally ran to more than 1,500 pages. He was persuaded to trim and split it into three books, published in the 1990s: Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone. Shadow Country, published in 2008, is a combination of those three books—further trimmed—but so re-worked that it is not so much a restoration of the original version as “a new rendering of the Watson legend,” Edgar J. Watson being the central character.
At nearly 900 pages, the book remains substantial, but for all its heft, it has so much momentum that I read it in just three sittings. E. J. Watson, the son of an established South Carolina family, gains a reputation as a desperado after being credited with the shooting of the outlaw queen Belle Starr. He relocates to southwest Florida—for a fresh start and also perhaps to escape the law—where he establishes a sugar cane plantation and makes plans to develop the region. He uses his reputation as an outlaw at his convenience, but he is eventually implicated in over a dozen murders, including the killing of three of his employees, allegedly to avoid paying them their wages. He is ultimately feared and despised by all around him. As the book opens, he is killed by a large group of his neighbors.
Shadow Country is structured as three “books” that correspond to the earlier separate novels. The first describes the shooting of E.J. Watson, followed by the testimony of about a dozen characters who describe some element of their relationship with and observation of Watson. They create a tapestry of ambiguities, not just about the facts but about the justice of Watson’s death.
At the same time, Matthiessen, who has had a parallel career as a naturalist and environmentalist, creates a vivid portrait of the raw, untamed Everglades of southwest Florida of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and describes the costs, personal, communal and societal, that accompanied conquest of the frontier.
The second book takes place mostly several years after the death of Watson as Watson’s son Lucius searches for information from the same people who saw his father killed. Lucius, now a World War I veteran and scholar, is attempting to write a true account of his father’s life. As he investigates the contradictory claims and rumors, he tracks down his long lost brother and discovers the horrible family secret that may be central to the tragedy of E.J. Watson.
Lucius is the conscience of the novel, searching for truth and trying to understand and make sense of his past, his complex family and nature. Here, Matthiessen writes in spectacular style. As Lucius searches a cemetery for clues to the past:
He strayed across the sun-worn grass among old lichened monoliths, touching and tracing the inscriptions. The pains taken with the lettering astonished him—the knowing hands of nameless artisans, themselves long buried, incising stone calligraphies in memory of strangers. The age of these granites, hewn from crusts heaved up into the sun by planetary fire from miles beneath the surface of the earth, stirred him and humbled him. In quest of eternity, the upright stoned yearned toward the firmament, even as they too were gnawed minutely by the bloodless fungi and blind algae that worked with the wind and rain to obliterate man’s scratchings….
The sad solace of old cemeteries was a morbid sort of healing, though not to be despised on that account. The country graveyard in the woods was a last sanctuary, inviolable, not to be transgressed—man’s last hope of equity, as Papa might have said, with everyone content in their own bones. Yet even here, the car horns could be heard, searching every distance. In the end there was no escape from the bonds of space and time short of release into the void, leaving no more trace of one’s swift passage than the minnow’s glimmer on the flooded road to Gator Hook or the disintegrating mushrooms become dust in the sunny leaf-bed of this autumn wood or the circles of great raptors gyring high over the Glades in the passing of ancient winds across the sky.
The third “book” in the work, however, is perhaps the best. It takes the form of Watson’s chilling memoir. Recounting his life, from the years of parental abuse, up to his astonishing perspective on the day of his death, Watson reveals his capacity for true affection, his strained relationships with his children, a crisis with an alter ego that is perhaps clinically relevant, and the truth behind many of the myths. Matthiessen’s writing is at times breathtaking; we can see images that are dark but crystal clear. We devour a story that is complex, with multiple layers but illuminating and the emotion raw and authentic.
The book is ostensibly about one man’s life in Shadow Country, but Matthiessen is also writing the story of the nation over half a century, about the frontier, the conquest of wild lands and the costs of that effort. I think he is also writing about today, and about us. At the beginning of book two, he quotes George Eliot:
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.”
Note: In 1980 Matthiessen also won the National Book Award for non-fiction for Snow Leopard, his account of his two-month journey with naturalist George Schaller in the Himalayas.
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